This invention relates to segmenting, transforming, and viewing electronic documents.
People often access electronic documents such as web pages, text files, email, and enterprise (proprietary corporate) data using desktop or laptop computers that have display screens that are larger than 10 inches diagonally and using connections to the Internet that have a communication rate of at least 28.8 kbps. Electronic documents are typically designed for transmission to and rendering on such devices.
Internet-enabled devices like mobile phones, hand-held devices (PDAs), pagers, set-top boxes, and dashboard-mounted microbrowsers often have smaller screen sizes, (e.g., as little as two or three inches diagonally across), relatively low communication rates on wireless networks, and small memories. Some of these devices cannot render any part of a document whose size exceeds a fixed limit, while others may truncate a document after a prescribed length. Accessing electronic documents (which often contain many paragraphs of text, complex images, and even rich media content) can be unwieldy or impossible using these devices.
Automatic content transformation systems convert electronic documents originally designed for transmission to and rendering on large-screen devices into versions suitable for transmission to and rendering on small-display, less powerful devices such as mobile phones. See, for example, Wei-Ying Ma, Ilja Bedner, Grace Chang, Allan Kuchinsky, and HongJiang Zhang. A Frameworkfor Adaptive Content Delivery in Heterogeneous Network Environments. of SPIE Multimedia Computing and Networking 2000. San Jose, Calif., January, 2000.